A history of Italian literature

by Richard Garnett

The bulk of Leopardi’s writings, indeed, is diminutive, and the range of his ideas narrow; but within these limits he has approached absolute perfection more closely, not only than any other Italian, but than any modern writer. He is one of that small and remarkable class of men who have arisen here and there in recent Europe to reproduce each some peculiar aspect of the ancient Greek genius. As Shelley is a Greek by his pantheism, Keats by his feeling for nature, Platen by the architectonic of his verse, so is Leopardi by his impeccability. All the best Greek productions, whether of poetic or of plastic art, have this character of inevitableness: they can neither be better nor other than they are. It is not the same in romantic poetry. Shakespeare no doubt always chose the best path, but he always seems to have had the choice among a thousand. In almost everything of Leopardi’s, whether verse or prose, form and thought appear indissolubly interfused without the possibility of disjunction. This is eminently the case with his poems, perfect examples of lofty and sustained eloquence entirely uncontaminated by rhetoric. There are few thoughts which strike by their novelty, few elaborated similes, few phrases which stand forth in isolation from the environing text. All seems of a piece; but the words chosen are invariably the most apt to express the idea sought to be conveyed, and the stream of sentiment is as pellucid as it is impetuous. The same mastery is evinced in the descriptive passages, which never appear to exist for their own sakes, but as depicting the inner feeling of the poem by a visible symbol. Be the subject small or great, from the disappearance of a vast landscape at the setting of the moon, or the terrified peasant listening sleeplessly to the roar of Vesuvius, down to the rain pattering at the poet’s window, or the rattle of the carriage resuming its journey after the storm, these descriptions impress by their perfect adequacy and their complete fusion of speech and thought, and it can only be objected to them that they are finer than the moralities they usher in. So wrote the Greeks, and the recovery of an apparently lost type makes amends for the monotony of Leopardi’s dismal message to mankind and the extreme limitation of his range of thought. In his later days his horizon seemed to expand; his serio-comic Paralipomeni, already noticed with other examples of its class, displays an unexpected versatility, and his last ode, La Ginestra, inspired by the hardy and humble broom-plant flourishing on the brink of the lava-fields of Vesuvius, is more original in conception and ampler in sweep than any of its predecessors. It somewhat resembles Shelley’s Mont Blanc; as Shelley’s Triumph of Life, with equal unconsciousness on the author’s part, approximates to Leopardi’s first important poem, the Appressamento alla Morte. They had here a common model in Petrarch.

Leopardi’s poems, though the majority are in blank verse, may generally be defined as canzoni, either odes in the strict sense of the term, addresses to friends, impassioned outpourings of lonely thought akin to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or apostrophes to inanimate objects, such as the moon, the natural friend of the melancholy poet, or the Vesuvian broom-plant, already mentioned. A few pieces, such as Il Primo Amore, Il Risorgimento, are autobiographical; in these Leopardi usually adopts terza rima or the ordinary rhymed metres. Personal as these pieces are in subject, they are not really more subjective than the rest. Leopardi is entirely devoid of inventive power: the wandering shepherd of Asia, mouthpiece for one of his finest poems, is the author in everything but costume. Three of the most celebrated odes, To Italy, On the Florentine Monument to Dante, and To Angelo Mai on the Recovery of Cicero De Republica, may be styled patriotic; but although the love of Italy is clearly and eloquently expressed, the scorn of her actual condition, the fault of no one then breathing, is so bitter and contumelious that the effect is anything but Tyrtæan. These are nevertheless masterpieces of noble diction, and little short of miraculous for the age of twenty, at which they were produced. It is perhaps a defect that lines are frequently left unrhymed, and that the ear is thus defrauded of an anticipated satisfaction.

Leopardi’s blank verse is the finest in Italian literature. If it has neither the “wood-note wild” of Shakespeare’s sweetest passages, nor the voluminous harmony of Milton’s organ-music, nor the dainty artifice of Tennyson, it is fully on a par with the finest metrical performances of Shelley and Coleridge; and perhaps the English reader could hardly obtain a better idea of it than by imagining a blending of the manner of Coleridge’s idylls with that of Shelley’s Alastor. It admits of translation into English; while an adequate rendering of the strictly lyrical poems, so smooth and yet so muscular, like the marble statue of an athlete, would be an achievement of very great difficulty. Perhaps the following little piece may convey some idea of Leopardi’s manner in blank verse. Few are the poems in which a mere triviality has been made the occasion of a meditation so sublime:

Dear to me ever was this lonely hill,
And this low hedge, whose potent littleness
Forbids the vast horizon to the eye.
For, as I sit and muse, my fancy frames
Interminable space beyond its bound,
And silence more than human, and secure
Unutterable and unending rest,
Where even the heart hath peace. And as I hear
The faint wind’s breath among the trees, my mind
Compares these lispings with the infinite hush
Of that invisible distance, and the dead
And unborn hours of dim eternity
With this hour and its voices. Thus my thought
Gulfing infinity doth swallow up;
And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea.

Leopardi’s prose works, his correspondence and philological essays excepted, are, like his poetry, limited in extent and in range of subject, but incomparable for refinement and beauty of form. He deemed a perfect prose more beautiful and more difficult of achievement than poetry of like rank, and related to it as the undraped figure to the figure clothed. The most remarkable of his prose writings are the Dialogues, which almost all turn upon the everlasting theme of the misery of mankind, varied in the exposition with a grace and fanciful ingenuity recalling the little apologues in Turgenev’s Senilia. In one, Mercury and Atlas play at ball with the earth, become light as tinder by internal decay and the extinction of life; in another, the earth and the moon compare notes on the infelicity of their respective inhabitants; in another, Momus and Prometheus descend to earth to investigate the success of the latter’s philanthropic inventions, which have answered Momus’s expectations better than his; in another, Tasso’s familiar genius promises to make him happy in the only possible manner, by a pleasing dream. Comparison is continually suggested with two great writers, Lucian and Pascal, and Leopardi sustains it worthily. Inferior to Lucian in racy humour, to Pascal in keenness of sarcasm, he surpasses both in virtue of the poetical endowment which nature had utterly denied to them. In form he comes nearest to Lucian, in spirit to Pascal. Lucian, a healthy four-square man, robust in common-sense, little given to introspection and untroubled by sensitiveness, is constitutionally very unlike Leopardi; but it might be difficult to establish a closer parallel than between the Italian and the French recluse; both very sparing but very choice writers; exquisite scholars in classics and mathematics respectively; both hopeless pessimists because hopeless invalids; the keenest and most polished intellects of their time, and yet further astray on the most momentous subjects than many a man “whose talk is of bullocks.” Leopardi has the advantage in so far that his scorn of man never degenerates into misanthropy, and his negation is better than Pascal’s superstition.

Leopardi’s strictly ethical writings (Storia del Genere Umano; Parini, or On Glory; Bruto Minore; Filippo Ottonieri) are necessarily devoid of imaginative form, and hence want the peculiar charm of his Dialogues, but are not inferior in classical finish. They bring out a more serious defect of his thought than even his pessimism—his ultra-hedonism in definition of happiness as a succession of momentary pleasurable emotions, each to be enjoyed as something complete in itself without reference to antecedents or consequences. This theory, said to have originated with Aristippus of Cyrene, is precisely that put forth by Walter Pater at the beginning of his career, but afterwards virtually retracted. There is one human condition, and but one, which it actually does suit, and that is Leopardi’s own—the condition of the chronic invalid. To the sufferer whose life is a continual physical agony, the brief intervals of ease actually are the utmost bliss he is capable of conceiving, and he may well be forgiven if he makes a succession of such thrills of pleasure the ideal of life. From any other point of view this hedonism is the doctrine of a voluptuary, which Leopardi assuredly was not. His mode of thought, nevertheless, increased his infelicity by depriving him of solace from the anticipation of posthumous fame, for which, as no ingenuity could prove it a pleasurable sensation, his hedonistic materialism left no place. With his low estimate of men, he could repose little hope in their justice; nor, though perfectly aware of the supreme literary excellence of his own writings, could he feel the assurance of their immortality which is only possible to him who regards the universe as incarnate Reason. His verdict upon himself and them, widely at variance with the truth, but logical from his own point of view, is pathetically summed up in his epitaph on the imaginary Filippo Ottonieri, his own ideal portrait: “Here lies Filippo Ottonieri, born for renown and virtuous deeds; who lived without profit and died without fame; ignorant neither of his nature nor of his fortune.”

Many of Leopardi’s detached meditations and aphorisms evince great subtlety and accuracy of observation, distorted by his persistent determination to think ill of the human race as a whole, while amicably and often affectionately disposed towards its individual members. His philological writings are those of an accomplished scholar, but their themes are generally of minor importance. His letters are frequently most pathetic in their references to his wretched situation, which alone can excuse the frequent insincerity of those addressed to his father. On the whole, his faults and his virtues are such as to render him the most lively representation of the Italy of his day, superior to the Italy of a past age in so far as awakened to a consciousness of her abject condition, but not yet nerved to struggle for her redemption.

While Leopardi, although at heart a patriot, was virtually proclaiming patriotism a phantom, a poet of a very different cast was assailing abuses and preparing a better day by dint of humorous indignation and sturdy hopefulness. The Italy of the time stands between Leopardi and GIUSEPPE GIUSTI (1809-50) like Garrick between tragedy and comedy. Giusti’s gifts were less sublime than Leopardi’s, but not less original. What Leopardi was to the Italian language in its most classical form, Giusti was to the peculiar niceties of the most idiomatic Tuscan. What Leopardi was to the most elevated description of poetry, Giusti was to political satire. Indeed he was more, for Leopardi merely carried recognised form to more consummate perfection, while Giusti’s style was actually created by him. Rich as Italy had been in most kinds of humorous and burlesque poetry, she had achieved little in political satire for very evident reasons. Campanella and Alfieri had verged upon it; and Casti’s Animali Parlanti and Leopardi’s Paralipomeni may, from one point of view, be regarded as political satires, though rather belonging to the mock-heroic epic. But no political satirist had yet reached the heart of the people, partly because few had the courage to make the attempt, partly because metrical satire was as yet restricted to refined and artificial forms. The gallantry with which Giusti, living under the absolute government of Tuscany, itself wholly subservient to Austria, launched shaft after shaft against the oppressors of his country, is paralleled by the boldness of the literary innovation he made in discarding the time-honoured forms of blank verse and terza rima, and conveying satire in easy and familiar lyric.

Giusti has been compared to Béranger, but certainly falls short of the Frenchman as a master of song, while he has more of the sacred fire of poetical indignation. The Anacreontic side of Béranger’s genius has no counterpart in him. As a master of idiomatic Tuscan he stands alone; but his poems require a glossary, and what helps his fame with his countrymen hinders it with foreigners. His satires are sometimes called forth by the occurrences of the day, but are more frequently directed at some persistent evil or misfortune of the country; and although the expulsion of the foreigner and his vassals is the idea most commonly in the background, not a few of the best pieces treat of the defects of the Italian people itself, the frivolity of some classes of society, the ignorance and superstition of others, and not least the pretentious emptiness of much modern liberalism. The general tone of Giusti’s compositions is easy and humorous; but under the impulse of emotion he is capable of rising into high poetry, as in the description of the corruption of Florentine society in his Gingillino, or in the palinode to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, when (October 1847) the poet for a moment believed that Leopold was about to pursue a liberal course.